


Daylight

by notbecauseofvictories



Series: do you now or have you ever wanted the wrong characters to kiss [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age Difference, Ahch-To, Chores, F/M, Minor Finn/Rey, luke is hugely baffled by this, rey seduces luke skywalker in the angriest chore-doing way possible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:00:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13242975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: “Can I ask what you think it is you’re doing?” Luke says. His voice is only a little strangled.The silence that falls in its place is awkward, thick as sand. “Oh,” Rey stutters out. “Is that not—?”“No,” Luke grits out. “Please put your clothes back on.”





	Daylight

There’s a moment when Luke just—accepts it. He was young, once, and he’d had his fair share of beautiful things like her. And Rey is lovely, especially painted gold by the firelight; slender as a whipcord, she strips off her tunic as matter-of-factly as breathing. (Oh, to be young again, and so sure of your appeal, the desirability of your flesh. To be _right_.) Even shut off from the Force utterly, he can tell how much power crackles under her skin. It wells up from her body, collecting like rainwater in the hollows of her clavicles, the flare of her hips.

She hesitates, just barely, before lowering herself to sit on his bed. “Okay,” Rey-from-Nowhere says. It has been a very long time since Luke Skywalker touched another human. Longer, since he’s been touched. He—

He screws his eyes shut, and then covers them with a hand for good measure.

“Can I ask what you think it is you’re doing?” Luke says. His voice is only a little strangled.

The silence that falls in its place is awkward, thick as sand. “Oh,” Rey stutters. “Is that not—?”

“ _No_ ,” Luke grits out. “Please put your clothes back on.”

“I thought…”

“No.”

“Do you want the lightsaber?” she asks hesitantly. He can picture the uncertainty on her face, it’s so thick in her voice. “You have to promise not to throw it away again.”

“No, I don’t want the—do you have your clothes back on yet?”

“No.”

“Please put your clothes back on.”

“I can’t give you the _Falcon_ ,” she continues, but he can hear her shuffling around, and her voice is muffled. He hopes because she’s found her tunic. “It’s Chewie’s, Han left it to him. My staff?”

“No, I don’t want—why would I want your staff?”

She makes an angry noise. “It’s a solid scavenging staff, I did the welding myself! The grips are real d’irr leather.”

Kriff, she’s so _young_. “It’s a good staff,” Luke says, trying for gentle. It’s been a while since he’s had to be gentle with anyone, he’s afraid it comes out as gruff instead. “But I don’t want anything from you, Rey.”

“You can open your eyes,” she says sulkily, and and when he looks she’s frowning. Her arms are crossed over her breasts, and Luke tries very hard not to remember what they look like. (His list of sins is long, he has no desire to add ‘dirty old man’ to it.)

“Thank you,” Luke says. “But I mean it, there’s nothing I want from you.”

She somehow looks even _angrier._ “You invited me into your home. You gave me food. I don’t need charity.”

Luke blinks, opening his mouth and then shutting it again. It _has_ been a long time, he realizes; long enough that he’s forgotten. Jakku and Tatooine are different planets and he imagines not everything translates, but this—this he remembers. Aunt Beru never went anywhere without a conservator dish of food, even if she was just visiting her family on the Whitesun farm. When Jadaa Redsand had offered to teach Luke about mechanics, Uncle Owen always made sure that Luke brought a canteen of water just for her. And when Jabba threatened to take the Waterson farm, all the farming families around Toshe had scraped together the necessary credits to get them through.

Luke knew, because Moen Waterson always had snacks to give away, and let Luke ride in his speeder whenever Luke wanted.

It wasn’t always strictly equal—Luke had been friends with some of the bigger farm families, who showed up to the First Rainfall celebration with water tanks and off-world delicacies. But fair was fair. Everyone paid in, everyone helped, and everyone repaid what they could. You didn’t take charity.

Luke sighs. “I need fuel for the fire. Tomorrow, you can help me cut the peat.”

Rey still looks angry, but she nods once, sharply, and then storms out of the hut as though the Empire is at her heels. The door—recently rehung by Chewie, probably not as expertly as Luke had assumed—shudders as she passes, like it was caught in a passing storm.

When Luke drags himself to his bed, he carefully avoids sitting in the same spot she had.

 

* * *

 

The next day, Rey wields the spade like the peat had personally murdered her entire family. Luke decides not to comment.

 

* * *

 

In hindsight, he probably should have barred his door after that. She’s made herself comfortable in one of the other empty stone huts, and the _Falcon_ isn’t too far on the other side of the island, barely a half-day’s walk. Aside from trailing stubbornly after him as he goes about his daily routine, there’s no need for them to interact.

But it rains, the next night, and she turns up shivering and looking like nothing so much as a drowned porg.

Luke drapes his spare cloak over her shoulders as she edges closer to the fire. She looks up at him in surprise, and Luke half-shrugs. “Tomorrow, you can do the fishing.”

When she holds her hands out to warm them over the fire, they’re more scarred than he would have expected for one so young. Luke spends some time staring at the particularly ugly gash on the second knuckle of her left hand—it looks like the teeth of an engine-gear. (Luke had a smaller, similar scar on his left palm, though it’s faded now.)

He falls asleep before she leaves. He’s not actually sure if she does leave, but she’s not there come the morning.

 

* * *

 

Luke shows her how to clean the fish the next afternoon, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the cliff. She’s delighted by how the scales stick to her fingers, and only ruins three fish by too-eagerly stabbing them in the liver.

She’s still picking scales off her hands that evening. He’s horrified by the welling of fondness, watching her wrinkle her nose and scrape off a scale from her palm. Her nails are short, bitten-off, and Luke almost burns the fish trying to think of anything except her hands.

She lays down by the fire, after. She’s just a dark silhouette against the flames, and Luke is suddenly reminded of those nights on Endor—the strange joy of victory at great cost, affection running free and rich for the taking. Luke had kissed too many mouths, lovely creatures limned in firelight like Rey is now.

He’d made some stupid decisions then, half-crazy with grief and anger and screaming for his father’s ghost. He wonders what his excuse will be if he makes this one.

 

* * *

 

“I taught myself to fly on your Death Star run sim,” Rey says. She insisted on cleaning the fish herself today; Luke is meditating, though it isn’t quite the same without the Force to rush towards and fill himself with. Just being quiet and listening to the waves, the scrape of Rey’s knife.

Luke blinks.

“What?”

“I had an old x-wing training simulator,” Rey says with a shrug. “They had a lot of Civil War modules. One of my favorites was the Death Star run.”

“Oh,” Luke says. He’s not sure if he has anything else to add to that.

“They got your voice all wrong, though,” Rey says after a moment.

Luke snorts. He can imagine. “You ever see that holodrama, _The Lost Princess of Alderaan,_ or was that before your time?”

“We didn’t get a lot of holodramas on Jakku,” Rey says, and Luke huffs.

“Well, it was supposedly about Leia, all her adventures since the Empire had her declared dead in the wake of Alderaan. You should have seen the actor who played me, I think they just went out and picked the most absurdly pretty human they could find.”

Rey looks up from the fish, cocking her head and studying Luke. “I think you’re pretty,” she finally says, decidedly, like it’s a question she’s considered and resolved.

Luke laughs, but Rey just looks confused, as though she doesn’t understand the punchline of her own joke.

That night, he sleeps with his back to the fire.

 

* * *

 

He lends her the tunic without thinking much about it. The clothing she’d arrived in was stained blue-black by fish blood and peat, and she’d just looked back at him blankly when he teased her about washing.

(Desert girl, he has to remind himself. He hadn’t known anything but sonic baths and emulsifier powder until nineteen, watching Han scrub his shirt out in one of the rivers on Yavin.)

“Well. You can milk the thala-sirens?” he offers when she asks. He’s not a large man, but she looks comical in his clothing—she’d had to double his belt to just make it fit around her waist.

Rey grimaces. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to have sex?”

Luke—

          —has _no_ feelings about that.

He tells her to borrow a broom from one of the nuns instead, and sweep the path to the tree. He is then mysteriously deaf when she protests that it’s impossible to sweep a _dirt_ path.

They stay up too late that night, which is his own damn fault for getting drawn into an argument about speeder models and some updates to the latest grav-engine. He doesn’t think about how his tunic keeps sliding down her shoulder, only for her to yank it up with increasing irritation. She has dirt smudged on her throat, in the shape of her fingers.

 

* * *

 

She is young enough to be his daughter. She is _younger_ than Ben.

He is seriously considering the possibility that all this time on Ahch-To has driven him mad.

 

* * *

 

“Teach me to swim,” Rey says one morning, and because he is Luke Skywalker and convinced of always doing the terrible, impossible thing, he takes her up on it.

She almost drowns two or three times, but Leia was a good teacher. (The warm pools of Yavin were a gentler master than the choppy seas around Ahch-To, but there’s nowhere else. Still, Luke wishes he could have done Rey the kindness—she’s had so little of it, as a general rule.) Soon, Luke is watching her slip from wave to wave like a srindar pup, laughing.

“Watch me!” she calls, and Luke’s tempted to answer back, _how could I not,_ because it’s true. He wonders if he was this golden and irresistible, back when he was a nascent Jedi, Death Star-killer. He wonders if that was what was what drew his mother to his father—that burning, heedless beauty of youth, mixed with power. So much of the Force in a too-small body to contain it.

A little after, Luke is lying on the beach, watching the clouds drift overhead, when Rey’s head suddenly blots out the sun. “You’re dripping on me,” Luke deadpans, and she laughs, shaking herself off like Chewbacca. Luke shuts his eyes, making an offended noise.

She laughs again, a clear, delighted sound that rings out in the air, and there’s a another noise as she shifts, the rocks crunching underfoot.

The next moment, her hands are cradling his face and Luke sucks in a ragged breath. “Stay still,” Rey says lowly, and then she’s wiping the saltwater from his cheeks, her knuckles passing over his cheek, her thumb moving against his jaw. Luke is almost afraid to open his eyes, afraid of what he’ll find—

His heart is very loud, in his ears.

“There,” she says. She’s close enough that he can feel her breath on his face and for a dizzy, uncertain moment, he thinks she’ll kiss him. Instead he hears her clamber to her feet. She walks back down the rocky beach, the sound of stones grinding against one another growing further and further away.

Even behind his eyelids, the sun is too bright without her to cast a shadow.

 

* * *

 

He is genuinely surprised when she comes to his door and knocks. There’s a solid minute where he just—stops, watching his door wondering who it could possibly be. Everyone these days just lets themselves in, heedless of his privacy.

(She’d walked in on him undressing once, and it was the first and last time he’d ever seen her flustered. For someone who treats her own body with a transactional matter-of-factness, she’d blushed all the way up and down her neck at the sight of his.)

“Come in?” he says, and he stares when it’s just her, standing there in the doorway.

“I want to ask for something,” she says. She’s fidgeting with the hem of his shirt—she never did give it back, and it looks better on her anyway, so Luke hadn’t been too pressed.

“ _Rey_ ,” Luke says warningly, but her jaw is set in that mulish line. He doubts she’ll be persuaded. She doesn’t seem like the type who could be.

“Come back with me. Join the Resistance,” she says, and he sighs.

“You know I won’t. We’ve discussed—”

“I won’t accept charity,” she says, and Luke swallows when she reaches for his belt, uncoiling it from around her waist. The door shuts behind her when she steps fully into his hut. For a long, silent moment, they’re both bathed in shadow.

That looks better on her too.

“Think about what you’re saying,” Luke says, pleads. “Leia wouldn’t want—”

“She’s not here.”

“Fine, _I_ don’t want you to—trade yourself for the Resistance. That isn’t fair.”

“We could make it fair, though,” Rey says, and Luke wants to choke on all the hope in her voice. “An equal trade. You come help the Resistance, and I’ll…do whatever you want me to.”

Luke wants to say that’s too dangerous of a promise to make, but he’s paid attention to Rey’s stories of Jakku—all the haggling over partial portions, an exacting evaluation of all things, including skin and soul. He would not do her the disrespect of assuming she doesn’t know the worth of what she’s offering. “Rey, you are very young. And I am…well, _not_. What about Finn?”

He pulls the name out like a trump card, but she just bristles. “Finn isn’t here either,” she snarls. “Do you agree to the terms, or not?”

“Not!” Luke says, his voice coming out strangled. In the half-darkness, Rey’s face falls.

“Well, why not?”

“I am—”

She moves faster than he thinks she will, striding across the room until he’s pushed up against the wall, warding her off with just a hand. (If she moves any closer, that hand will be cupped around her breast, and he’ll be gone, he’ll be done. He’s trying so hard, but he’s just human and it’s been _a really kriffing long time_.) Luke hisses between his teeth, and in the gloom her grin shines like a sickle.

“You want me,” she says. He’s not sure if it’s his body or the Force that betrays him, but he curses them both under his breath. “I know you do.”

“It’s inappropriate.”

“Why?”

“You’re so young.”

“Well, you’re pretty,” she says, and the sulky tone is back. Her eyes are even darker in the gloom, and all Luke can think about is her slim, scarred hands on his face, the golden-burning of her. “And strong, and a legend. I want to fuck you.”

She says it like it’s the first time she’s ever said it, trying out the crudeness as an experiment, and Luke’s breath stutters. “Rey,” he says, and then can’t think of what comes next.

“Come back to the Resistance,” she says, crowding him. She smells of peat fires, and Luke is all but delirious, inhaling her. “Come back with me. Teach me to be a Jedi, and we can fight, side by side.”

“I fucked up the galaxy,” Luke babbles, grasping at anything that might stop her from looking so intently at his mouth. He _wants_ and it’s wrong, it’s unpardonable, but he’s never been very good at denying himself. Something else he inherited from Anakin Skywalker. “I almost killed my nephew, I doomed—”

“Okay,” Rey says. She takes his hands and guides them to the hem of her tunic—his tunic—and his knuckles brush the bare skin of stomach by accident

She’s as warm as the desert. Warmer.

“Come back,” Rey-from-Nowhere says. There’s still power collected in the hollows of her throat, and there at her temples, shining—Luke wants to reach out, tangle his fingers in it. It’s been so long. It’s been too long. He failed at being the legend, but he can still reach out and touch it, embodied in this girl with her eyes full of sand and her scarred knuckles and so much Light.

“Fine,” he says, steering her towards his hard and rocky bed. “Yes.”

When he kisses her, her mouth tastes like saltwater.

 

* * *

 

Luke lifts a hand, shielding his eyes against the white sun of Crait. He can feel Leia looking at him sidelong, even though Rey is gone—somewhere, wherever the mythological Finn is, she’s sure to follow. It’s just Luke, feeling very old and worn-through even as he clutches his third-hand lightsaber. And Leia, looking at him.

“What convinced you?” Leia asks, the canny note in her voice Luke was used to hearing when she was trying to get Han to confess whatever it was he’d been up to.

Luke huffs, tightening his grip  around the lightsaber until his fingers are numb. “Oh, you know,” he says. “We just—reached an agreement.”


End file.
